Must See Exhibitions in France

“The Softest Hard” Monographic Exhibition by Marija Olšauskaitė

From October 25, 2024 to March 23, 2025, and as part of the 2024 Lithuanian Season in France, Carré d’Art – Musée d’art contemporain de Nîmes presents The Softest Hard by artist Marija Olšauskaitė (b. 1989, Vilnius). Several works, including some in glass, will be on display in the Project Room on the 2nd floor of Carré d’Art, an oscillation between the traditions of craft and ornament and the social role of sculpture.

Marija Olšauskaitė uses a variety of collaborative modes and explores themes of relationships, openness, intimacy and belonging. This exhibition focuses on her long affinity with glass. She creates forms that always seem to be in a state of transformation, using both conventional and more contemporary materials such as silicone.

Softeners is a series of sculptures in silicone, revealing traces of gesture on their surface. They evoke the vulnerability and lightness of cloths drying in a shed, the memory of the past.

In the Tranquility Extension series, the artist pays homage to her mother, an artist herself, and to the works she created or admired. Large, stained-glass-like papers produced for this exhibition depict still lifes, quiet lives and memories of early childhood.

Little Ears, made as wall sculptures refer to the unseen and unheard aspects of daily life, public spaces and fragility of relationships.

Ponds is a set of large horizontal glass sculptures. Glass production usually requires a light table to discern imperfections. In this case, the relationship between form and function is rethought, with forms becoming impractical and the instrument transformed into an object reminiscent of a luminous, translucent block of ice.

In many of her works, there is a direct reference to Lithuania’s once flourishing glass production. The artist continues to work with glassmakers from companies that are still active. She recovered colored glass plates from the Raudonoji Ausra company, which was active until the 1990s and used to make stained glass. Workers at times had smuggled them out of the factory, enabling her to obtain and collect them as well as give them a new lease of life. They are featured in the series of glass folding screens Never Act in Haste.

Marija Olšauskaitė’s sculptures seem to have a life of their own, passing through an alchemical process from liquid to solid state. These forms, which can sometimes seem to come straight from the future, are objects that question the sensations we can feel in front of them, and force us to think about how we share them. As she puts it, all the objects in the exhibition are twins, brothers or sisters in a family dynamic. They are in dialogue with each other.

Presented at the same time as the Aleksandra Kasuba exhibition, Marija Olšauskaitė’s works continue the ideas of her elder, who conceived architecture as a means of thinking about and reinventing human relationships, affirming the social role of architecture and art.

“Imagining the Future” Retrospective Exhibition by Aleksandra Kasuba

From October 25, 2024 to March 23, 2025, and as part of the 2024 Lithuanian Season in France, Carré d’Art – Musée d’art contemporain de Nîmes presents Imagining the Future, the first major exhibition in France, and also in Europe, of the pioneering artist Aleksandra Kasuba (1923- 2019), known for her multidisciplinary practice on the threshold of design, architecture and experimental art.

The Lithuanian-born US artist Aleksandra Kasuba (born Fledžinskaitė, 1923–2019) was a visionary of the 20th century space exploration era. A retrospective of her work is constructed as a bright, inspiring narrative about losses and possibilities as well as futures that emerge in the face of turbulent times.

It is the story of how Kasuba who was forced to flee her home country after World War II and emigrated to the USA. She settled in New York and became an artist creating visionary spatial environments made of tensile fabrics; a story about an imaginary future without right angles as a habitat for the wandering soul.

It presents the works and an archive of documents donated by the artist to the Lithuanian National Museum of Art in 2014– 2019. The originals of these documents are kept at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, D.C. The exhibition is complemented by contributions of the artist’s friends – a perfumer Danutė Pajaujis Anonis, actress and cinematographer Pola Chapelle, Fluxus artist George Maciunas and avant-garde film maker Jonas Mekas.

Wanderer
Hall 14

The narrative begins with an introduction of the Wanderer, the artist’s invented existential character who dreams and walks through life, her alter ego, which appears for the first time in the drawing The Little Man (1950) and in early paintings and mosaics, then later in her manifesto Utility for the Soul (1970), and finally in the watercolor series A Life (2012–2013). The severity of the experience of a lonely wanderer is represented by the black sandstone mosaics from 1965.

Spectrum, An Afterthought
Hall 15

We experience the world without right angles and perceive how Light Splits into Colors when passing through Kasuba’s environment Spectrum, An Afterthought (1975) – a project reconstructed according to the artist’s precise instructions first in Lithuania and now in France. “Rainbow archways. They appear at any time, everywhere, to everyone. Light brings colors out, separates, scatters, mingles, brightens, dims, and carries colors away,” – wrote the artist.

Laboratory of Environments
HALL 16

The Laboratory of Environments tells about Kasuba’s involvement in the Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) movement in US in the 1960s which led to the evolution of her spatial imagination – from reliefs and plexiglass structures (Gateway, 1968) to the social utopia of the Global Village (1971–1972).

Environments for the Soul
HallS 17, 18, 19

A series of Environments for the Soul were created using different media and installed in various locations: from Kasuba’s private home in New York in 1971–1972 that according to the art historian Inesa Brašiškė, “…manifested the artist’s longtime concern with the human sensorium and advanced the out-of-theordinary interface between the subject and the environment”, to the environments constructed in public spaces, including the magnificent Suspended Gothic (1979) which the artist built together with her students.

Art in Science
HALL 20

Aleksandra Kasuba participated in the Art in Science program of the Philadelphia College of Textiles and Science of the University City Science Center in 1977 and 1983-84, had her first solo exhibition at the Esther M. Klein Gallery in Philadelphia in 1989. In the catalogue of this exhibition, an innovator German architect, Frei Otto, acknowledges that “In the field of fabric structures the work of Aleksandra Kasuba stands out as a strong personal vision. It is about the permutation of forms, natural to things in states of tension. Kasuba’s inspiration comes from organic structures and forms of nature.”

Rock Hill House
Hall 21

The exhibition concludes with a story of the construction of the Rock Hill House in the New Mexico desert (2001–2005) which reveals the coherence of Kasuba’s reflections on the human connection to nature, her fascination with organic forms leading to futuristic visions of coexistence with the natural environment. It also includes photographs of plants and animals of the New Mexico desert made in 2002–2010 by Judith S. Miller, an artist-resident at the Rock Hill House.

About CARRÉ D’ART

Inaugurated in 1993, the opening of Carré d’Art-Musée d’art contemporain de Nîmes is a successful example of the opening up to contemporary art and the policy of decentralisation undertaken in France from the 1980s onwards. Situated between the CAPC in Bordeaux and the Abattoirs in Toulouse to the west, and the MAC in Marseille and the MAMAC in Nice to the east, the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Nîmes is a link in a chain that has been completed over the years with a view to promoting and disseminating contemporary art in the Mediterranean region.

Like its Parisian model, the Centre Georges Pompidou, Carré d’Art houses the media library and the museum of contemporary art, offering Nîmes residents and visitors from abroad a new place to live. It was in 1983 that Jean Bousquet, newly elected Mayor of Nîmes, confirmed his plans to raise the city’s cultural profile around the major project of creating this new institution.

Begun in 1986, with considerable help from the Direction des Musées de France, the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art now comprises almost 600 works.

For more information, please visit https://www.carreartmusee.com/.